Metafiction fails because it does not invite us inside but rather makes us stand back and watch the author look at his own reflection; the reader is left outside, alone, and the one thing Mark hates more than anything in the world is "to believe he is alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian metafiction affects him. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor" (303). [...] Wallace's work, conversely, seeks not to depict solipsism but rather to overcome it.